Privatbankár.hu Fintech Innovation 2016 - Balázs Vinnai

Privatbankár.hu Fintech Innovation 2016 - Samee Zafar

Privatbankár.hu Fintech Innovation 2016 - Round table discussion

is Deputy State Secretary, responsible for Financial Policy Affairs at the Ministry for National Economy (January 2014-). He is member both the EU and the OECD Economic Policy Committees, and the Financial Stability Board’s Regional Group in Europe.

Formerly he was working with the Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority (HFSA) at the post of Vice President, responsible for Supervisory Policy, Risk Analysis, Regulation, International Affairs and Financial Consumer Policy, (2010-2013). He also had a supervisory background from an earlier time, he was Managing Director at the HFSA, between 2001 and 2004.

He spent more than five years at Magyar Nemzeti Bank as Senior Advisor in International Affairs (2005-2010), dealing mostly with EU and payment system issues.

Back in 2001 he was appointed Government Commissioner for Anti Money Laundering Policy, to coordinate the reform of the Hungarian AML regime until 2013.

He spent most of the 1990’s in Paris first as Counselor (1991-1993), than Minister Plenipotentiary, Negotiator in Chief for Hungary’s OECD Accession, (1994-1996) and later as Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Hungary to the OECD, (1996-1999).

He has written into a number of books and publications, for example the

Handbook of Central Banking and Financial Authorities in Europe, London 2005, (Author of one chapter)

Aligning Financial Supervisory Structures with Country Needs,(Author of one chapter), World Bank, Washington D.C, 2004.

Director of the Financial Infrastructures Directorate in the Magyar Nemzeti Bank

He has been the Director of the Financial Infrastructures Directorate in the Magyar Nemzeti Bank since November 2007. The division is responsible for regulation and supervision of payment services, oversight of clearing and settlement systems, and plays an active role in the development of the Hungarian payment and securities clearing and settlement infrastructures. He has been member of the ESCB Payments and Securities Settlement Committee and chairman of the Hungarian CSD’s (KELER Zrt) supervisory board. He has been working for Magyar Nemzeti Bank since 1998 and has held different positions in the financial infrastructures directorate. Before joining Magyar Nemzeti Bank, he worked for Arthur Andersen, the Hungarian State Holding Company, a commercial bank and in DG Payments Systems in the European Central Bank.

Nyéki Zsolt

Deputy CEO, OTP Mobile

Zsolt is the second in rank of OTP Mobile, the company behind the Simple application introduced in 2014, which provides an unmatched and comprehensive shopping experience to its users on three mobile platforms.Zsolt’s studies were mainly taking place in the United States at the Case Western Reserve University, where he earned an MBA degree, and at Cornell University, where he received a degree in financial management. He started his career as a business development manager at Westel in 1997. He was responsible for introducing the mobile version of banking and financial services to the public. Later he transferred to Vodafone where he was head of business development and was in charge of the preparation of Vodafone Mobiltárca’s launch. He joined the OTP Mobile family in May, 2014 as deputy CEO. His main tasks include the development of the Simple application which grew to be Hungary’s no. 1 m-commerce application since its launch in 2014. At the moment it operates 9 different industry’s marketplace in 1 m-comm app.

Tamas Blummer

Chief ledger architect, Digital Asset

Tamas is an engineer and financial risk manager with decades of experience developing software for financial services and a pioneer of blockchain technology.Tamas wrote pricing libraries for derivatives, developed automated trading systems, traded fixed income instruments, managed global trade routing processes at Deutsche Bank between 1996 and 2008 in Frankfurt am Main. He joined MSCI, at that time part of Morgan Stanley in Budapest in 2009, to build and operate financial risk reporting software. In 2012 he led the team in Budapest that rebuilt Morgan Stanley’s ledger substantiation.Tamas founded Bits of Proof and introduced the first enterprise ready implementation of a blockchain at the San Jose Bitcoin conference in 2013. Bits of Proof software was used to build a real-time audit-able exchange for institutional investors, a retail payment processor, the backend for the first hardware Bitcoin wallet and powered one of the biggest Bitcoin mining farms. Digital Asset acquired Bits of Proof in 2015 since then Tamas works as Chief Ledger Architect at Digital Asset. He is also an elected member of the Technical Steering Committee of the Hyperledger Foundation, the cross-industry effort to develop open standard for distributed ledgers.

Dr. Jozsef Czimer

Jozsef started his career in the National Bank of Hungary working in international money market operations. Later he joined the regulations department where he had the opportunity to manage a considerable part of the country’s banking devolution reform by organizing the handing over of foreign currency operations by the National Bank to the new commercial banks.Still as a regulator he started to deal with bank card operations. Later, as a deputy CEO of the new IBUSZ Bank he had the opportunity to manage the country’s then largest card acivity. Having an innovator’s view he started to deal with e-money operations already in the 1990s by exploring possibilities. Later he became to be an expert of this subject lecturing in the Central Europen University on it and advising several companies including the Hungarian Post and SenseNet Ltd. The latter later became to be the issuer of the first and only Hungarian e-money, Barion.Having worked in different areas of the payment services he started to deal with the immediate payments services in 2014. Now he works together with the largest companies of this world, VocaLink and ACI Worldwide and represents in London also Capsys Informatics, Budapest.Working in London he is an acknowledged member of the consultants’ community of the City.

Tom Hay

Head of Payments Practice at Icon Solutions

Tom has worked in IT for over 25 years, specialising in the architecture and design of payment systems. He has worked around the world with banks, central clearing organizations, software houses and consultancies, ranging from start-ups to blue chip companies. As co-founder and CTO of Nomad Software he designed Cortex, one of the first open systems card processing platforms. Later as Head of Architecture at Vocalink, who operate the UK’s Bacs and LINK clearings, he was lead architect for UK Faster Payments and later for IPS, the international immediate payments product used in Singapore. As interim CTO for Zapp, Tom designed an open bank-centric mobile payments system aimed at C2B m-commerce payments. Tom now heads the Payments Practice at Icon Solutions, because he shares their philosophy of providing honest answers and pragmatic solutions that really address the needs of their clients, and simplifying complexity.

Lauren Jones

Head of Standards at Payments UK

Lauren Jones is responsible for coordinating payment standards activities on behalf of Payments UK, its members and other key stakeholders. She is responsible for engaging with stakeholders such as domestic and international regulators and central government to gather and assess information and understand their requirements as they relate to standards, as well as the supply side of the market to understand their implementation. With many years’ experience in standards, she has been involved in the development of the G20 endorsed Legal Entity Identification standard, development of pan-European instant payments as well as leading the ISO 20022 real-time payments harmonisation initiative. She is Head of Delegation for the UK at ISO on financial services issues, including ISO 20022. She has a deep understanding of standardisation implications on emerging technologies such as blockchain, digital currencies and APIs and represents the UK on the ISO Fintech Advisory Group for Financial Services. She has spoken at various conferences and information sessions on matters involving international standards and has written articles on payments and standards, published in various journals and trade press.

Barry Kislingbury

Director Solution Consulting, Immediate Payments - ACI Worldwide

Barry has worked in the financial industry for nearly 30 years. Originally from an engineering background he has designed, developed and integrated market data distribution, financial messaging and payment systems around the globe. After a period as a software developer Barry joined Lloyds Bank where he held a variety of technical roles working on PCs, networks and mainframes. Later he worked for software vendors ACT Financial Systems, Misys Securities Trading Systems and Misys Banking Systems on their trading, banking, financial messaging and payment solutions.Barry joined ACI Worldwide in 2013 to lead Solution Consulting, transforming payments utilising ACI’s industry-leading UP Framework with the Universal Payments strategy. His recent work has included UK Faster Payments solutions, implementation of standards and enabling real time systems around the world. Barry also participates in several industry bodies, including the European Payments Councils Scheme Technical Forum, the EBA Real Time Forum and the ISO 20022 Real Time Payments Group.

Ferenc Böle

OTP Bank, IT Project Management and Methodology Directorate

Ferenc has started his career in 2001 at Ernst&Young and started to work in the banking industry in 2005 at K&H Bank. Then he was working for Ness Hungary as senior consultant, and CIB Bank where he led IT Development before he joined OTP Bank in 2015.He has solid experience in project management and banking IT architecture, and now is responsible for the project portfolio and strategic IT initiatives at OTP Bank.

Kris Kubiena

International Sales Director, VocaLink

Kris joined VocaLink in 2004 and is responsible for leading the International business development function within the Commercial Services business unit.Kris has over 30 years experience in delivering financial service and payments solutions. Before joining VocaLink he was Head of Operations at Minster Trust in London where he was responsible for implementing a web-enabled solution to support a white-labelled e-banking strategy including UK payments integration. Kris has also delivered major programmes and solutions at JP Morgan and Citibank. At VocaLink Kris was responsible for delivering the core Payments Engine for the UK payments technology renewal programme and was instrumental in concluding an agreement for the delivery of Immediate Payments in Singapore.

Samee Zafar

Director, Edgar, Dunn & Company Management Consultants London Office

Samee is a Director in the London office of Edgar, Dunn and Company, a global strategy consulting firm where he leads the firm’s Advanced Payments consulting practice and has advised clients on innovation, digital strategy, virtual currencies, eCommerce, digital wallets, and payments regulation. Samee has worked with some of the world’s largest banks, payment providers, mobile operators, and technology firms in North America, Europe, Middle East and East Asia working at the Board level. Client projects completed also cover loyalty, payment cards, data analytics, and new technologies such as Real Time Payment Systems and the uses of virtual currencies and blockchain / distributed ledger protocols. Recently, he was part of the team that helped envision and implement Turkey’s first national payment scheme, Troy.He previously worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York and Visa International in London. He is a regular speaker at key industry events such as the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Money2020, and International Payment Summit, and has co-authored a book “Developing and Managing a Successful Payment Cards Business” published by Gower Publications. He writes (an irregular) blog published on Linkedin and separately on https://sameeblog.wordpress.com/.Samee has a B.Sc in Mathematics and Physics from Government College in Lahore, Pakistan, is a chartered accountant, and was a Commonwealth Scholar at the Cass Business School of the City University in London where he earned his MBA in Finance.

Szász Ferenc

Ingenico Group - Country sales manager - Hungary

Ferenc Szász has more than 15 years experience in the sales and business development area of IT business. The multinational and multicultural company standards, matrix organization challenges are well known for Ferenc, he worked for several large companies of IT and payment industry, like IBM Hungary, GTS Datanet, First Data and NCR Corporation. He is working for Ingenico Group since 2015.

Zoltán Szeles

co-CEO, founder and shareholder, CAPSYS

After graduating from Budapest University of Economics (recently renamed Corvinus) in 1995 Zoltán joined Deloitte &Touche as a management consultant. He was quickly hunted down by the owners of Procent Investment Ltd, where he became deputy CEO and member of the board. While building his career at Procent he continued his studies and received his MBA from his alma mater. It was at Procent where he built the foundations of his current company: he and his team designed a new retail brokerage software called Zeus. Zeus boasted innovative account administration and trading functionality, multiple portfolio views, and on-line Internet brokerage services, that it was a logical step to apport the solution into a new company, Capsys, and start marketing the solution as a product. CAPSYS Informatikai Ltd. (then Capital Systems Informatikai Ltd.) was registered in 1998, and started its independent operations in 2000. Zoltán and his colleagues bought out Capsys the same year and they run the company as an independent entity ever since.

Balázs Vinnai

General Manager of Misys Digital Channels

Balázs Vinnai as General Manager of Misys Digital Channels is responsible for retail digital channels business.Balázs Vinnai is known as the CEO of IND Group, a company he established in 1997. IND specialised in the innovation and development of digital banking solutions, grew rapidly to a market leader in the EMEA region and was acquired by Misys in 2014.Since 2007 Balázs has also held the position of Vice President in the Software Development and Innovation Committee of the ICT Association of Hungary (IVSZ).

László Hankiss

Managing director of GRÁNIT Bank Strategy and Analysis Directorate

He earned his Master’s degree at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration in 2000. He started to work at the Ministry of Economics as macro analyst. In 2002 he joined OTP Bank Plc. as advisor of the Managing Director of Retail Directorate. During that time he completed the Bank Management Program of International Training Centre for Bankers. From 2007 he was assigned to head the International Retail Coordination Department: he was coordinating and supporting the integration and development of OTP Bank’s eight foreign subsidiaries in retail banking business line focusing on key areas as strategy, business development and risk management.

In 2010 he joined GRÁNIT Bank as the managing director of Strategy and Analysis Directorate and he is taking active part in the development of an innovative and successful digital bank.

András Szentgyörgyi

Director of Business Development, Capsys

András joined Capsys in 2003 with focus on business development. After graduating from Budapest University of Economics (recently renamed Corvinus) in 1996 he worked for Citibank in both Venezuela and Hungary, later he joined Bank One, then worked at the Bank of New York and ING Barings in New York City. During most of career András worked in various positions in investment services with special focus on client relations (institutional investors - buy side). Currently he is sales director with special emphasis on international expansion of Capsys sales and services.